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Office 12 to beat Longhorn, emphasize collaboration

A few more details about Office 12 have come out in the past few days. It will …

Earlier this week, Microsoft released a few details of the next version of Office, Office 12. The original plan was to release Office 12 with Longhorn, apparently Microsoft has decided to suck it up and roll the suite out in 2006. Not a lot else was said about the forthcoming product, but a few more details have trickled out today. In particular, Office 12 will draw on some of the expertise that Microsoft got when it purchased Groove Networks in order to build more collaborative features into the office suite.

One of the first steps in working with colleagues is finding out which co-workers are actually available. In that regard, Microsoft plans to expand its current work on corporate instant messaging and add support for Internet telephony.

The ability to handle voice over Internet Protocol technology is "one of the core features (Microsoft is) building into the next version of Office," said Hilf, Microsoft's director of platform technology strategy. The company also plans to continue adding more server-based products to the Office family of products, he said... The company has said it plans to significantly expand its use of Extensible Markup Language, or XML, as a means of exchanging data.

A lot of the new collaboration tools that will be rolled into Office 12 are apparently drawn from Microsoft Office Communicator 2005. The VoIP stuff in particular is interesting, as its further encroachment into the guts of the world's most popular office suite lends credence to the idea that VoIP is poised to wipe out traditional long distance in the business space real soon now.

I hope all of these fancy collaborative features make it over to the Mac version of Office, a hope that's borne out of my long-standing desire to see better cross-platform collaborative software. I used to love Groove, and I wish that it, or something like it, would come to the Mac. The Ars virtual office consists of a combination of email, IRC, AIM, and HTML, a combination that works reasonably well for us but that only crudely approximates what Groove could do way back when it was in beta.